Mike Minutes Mastermind 08/19/2024

Good morning destination. Hope you're doing good. Let's get this thing kicked off. A couple quick announcements.

We have.

The follow up call and objections handling document completed. It's about four, three, three pages.

That'Ll be on the dashboard within the next couple days. Also, Nick will notify us when he has put up the Christmas lights headers. So if you're making email templates, we have email signatures, we have.

Invoice templates, estimate template headers. If you want to create separate email templates inside of Copilot, those will be available for you from the dashboard. So.

Nick will share those with everyone as well as put them on the dashboard and let everyone know on Facebook once those are up.

We have already submitted a ton of print designs for Christmas lights to the Pro Shop. It just takes.

Some amount of time for Vistaprint to actually get it done and put it on the pro shop. So those are impending. Should be any day. Could be right now, honestly as of Friday I know they were still waiting on them to get those into the pro shop. Flyers, postcards, door hangers, all the above will be on the Pro shop available for.

Printing. All right, go ahead and get started. Looks like we got three questions today. First one is from Kyle Tarvin. Do you get charged per minute when CC responds or emails that help at Augusta email if it is related, like so help is a ton of emails go there. If you're like asking for a project, yes, you're gonna get charged. If you're asking like for clarification on your invoice, no, nothing like that. It's gonna get charged. But in terms of like if you're asking them to do work or look into your account, etc, yes, you'll be charged if email help@ Augusta.

Mr. Anonymous, would it make any sense to purchase multiple territories but run them under 1cc bill, one shop location, et cetera? Instead of having multiple GMs, there's one GM, one GM running multiple location but under one roof. Thoughts? On this model there's one GM running multiple locations but under one roof. You could definitely do that. From the way that we would operate from like command center, we would still have a separate phone number for each one and a separate invoice, et cetera. But if you're like hey I just want to charge all the one you just have like you know, one credit card for example and you know, or one bank account really actually. And then you just have like four or five charges from all the locations. So there are already companies that do this inside of Augusta Nation and they're operating much more as like, hey, we're just going to have a big company and we're going to break it into like departments, more or less, and then have department kind of heads, departmental type heads, and we'll call them GMs and they just do everything under one. That's fine, totally fine. The only reason to do it otherwise is if you want the GMs to run it more like their business and give them more autonomy. Having their own bank account, having their own credit cards, having their own, you know, everything very broken apart. There's pros and cons of both of those things. The pros are that you get a GM that's going to feel much more like an owner and feel like they have much more autonomy. The cons are, are that you're going to have to pay for multiple different accounts. There's a little more legwork, bookkeeping. So there's pros and cons of either model. And so if you're trying to run things extremely, extremely tight in terms of cost and you're trying to squeeze every penny, you're probably going to save in the short term on doing everything through one. And then just like most franchises operate as like, how you get, how you set up your entity, they don't really care. What they do is they usually will sell zip codes or they'll sell territory rights. And then like, if you want to do it under one, great, that's up to you. If you want to do them separately, that's also up to you. But you, you basically buy territory rights. We do it a little bit, little bit differently in that we actually have a separate.

You know, website for every single one. This is, this allows you to be able to get much more narrow to that area instead of just having like, well, it's like very generic of our URL name. Because we're really technically servicing five different territories. We'd rather have you five different websites because you will get way better lead penetration. And so that would be my recommendation. And that's kind of why we do it that way. And then, you know how you set up your general managers, most of the time it's the fat. The fastest way to do it is combining everything because you don't have inherent trust built up with enough people to actually have general managers. You have like, work with them for a year or two and then they can, you can elevate them into GM and let them kind of learn the processes, send them the training. You can make it slower. So usually when you're trying to Go jump really fast. Doing it more as like a branched type situation under one bank account is probably the easiest, quote unquote. But there are a lot of inherent benefits for, for your top performing GMs to be able to have more autonomy where they have their own bank accounts, they have their own, you know, everything is much more separated and they really do feel like they can run it as if they own it. And they would, a lot of them would prefer to take a third of the profits, a good paycheck and if they add those two things together they start to realize like, oh, like I'm making more than the owner once I take the salary and the 30% of distributions. And now like going and competing with you is less of a formidable thing. Once the location, once they built the location up over two or three years. So in my opinion like I've just seen like most GMs take two years to actually see real good profit sharings even if they join a established location because there's just so much learning that has to take place in the first year that usually the profit sharing isn't amazing until the end of year two.

And so it just really comes down to can they stick it around, stick around for that long. And if they think they're going to go start their own location, that's fine, they're just going to make way less money than if they just took a salary and then hit the two or three year benchmark and started really being profitable. And so it's just like what do they want? Right? Some people are more entrepreneurial. They like, hey, I want to, I want to, I'd rather have all risk but all more upside. But a lot of times a GM ran location once you take their salary and then if they can get a third of the cut, like the cut, they have weight, no risk because they can walk away at any time. But they get a third of the upside plus their paycheck, which usually is actually more than the owner. Until you have a very large location like over 800,000, then the distributions could potentially for the owner be more than the salary plus distribute salary plus profit sharing to the GM and they have no risk. It's really not a bad proposition. But usually to get that spot someone's got to stick around for two or three years. And so if you're a GM listening to this, I just highly recommend like all the same way for owners, usually it's after five years they really start to see a location that's established management in place, it's predictable profits it's in profit mode and it's more or less giving you distributions every single quarter, year round. The same thing is true for a gm, like the first two to two years, think of it as like you're getting paid for training and then it's after that two years I see most time they start to get really good profit sharing.

So like my Mount Vernon location, that's been the case second, third year, like where like profit sharing was is five figures a quarter.

The only anomaly would have been like Marcus and Lee probably at the Bellingham shop. They rocked like pretty quickly in their first year to that point. But they were getting it handed down from myself and from Liz and it was being ran like we were doing larger projects. So revenues were really high. It was less systems or did they had to work way more hours because there's less systems in place and it was less simple, there was more complexity. So there was higher profits though, and they could use projects to really leverage their revenue a lot higher. But usually when it comes to just like learning from a. If you've never done management before and you're gm, listen to this, expect it to take two years to really get good at it. To where you actually see profit sharing and realize that if you're not making profit sharing, the owner's making zero. So you're making a lot more because you have salary or some sort of pay. Right. So just something to keep in mind.

Jen, Ken, Lynn. I got a Z trimmer for my mower. Allows you to do the trimming from your mower. Because I'm having a different, I'm guessing difficult, difficult time finding someone to do it reliably and consistently over time, it's cheaper too. And with the industry eventually going to remote mowers and AI writing our emails now and eventually taking our calls, do you see a time in the near future where you could only need to be there for the detail work? I've seen videos of AI answering phone calls and text messages, then talking about eventually running your books as well. I think you're writing your books as well. Would you say this is a good thing or bad thing? With labor so hard to come by and so unreliable, this is a good thing. Correct my train of thought. If I'm wrong, yeah, it'll get there. I would say until then, like I'm talking 10 to 15 years before this is actually going to be happening. In my opinion, you're going to have to become a better leader so that people want to work for you. That's really what it Comes down to for all of us. And so, yes, eventually, I do believe the mowing part will be done by robotics. And I believe once you can strap that onto an existing commercial mower, that technology is when it'll take off my pov, the cost will come down, it actually be viable. You don't have to think about things like slopes and whether it's wet. If a robot can and cannot be there. If you have to leave mowers on site, if you have to lease them to the customer, if you have to sign contracts for the customer, all of that stuff will go out the window. If you can strap the technology on an existing mower, push a button, you do the weed whacking and blowing, and it goes at the same speed as a regular.

Operator back and forth to doing the lawn. We're ways off from that.

Does everyone qualify for 3F, including CC agents or our local office agents? I haven't, we haven't addressed the local office agents thing yet. If they're working full time, though, at any location, I would honor it. CC agents do qualify for it, basically, as long as they work for you for full time for two years. And if you're like, well, they only work part time or they worked, you know, six months, a year, then I'd have to. We'd probably readjust like, you're gonna have to work longer. You can't work for two spring rushes for two or three months part time at a location and then get the 3F program. The whole point is to be able to. For you to be able to keep talent on for that period of time that you otherwise would not be able to because they'd go bounce and get another job. So if someone's working part time, if they're working half the season, not going to do it. But if they're, you know, an office agent and they work two solid years full time for you, yeah, 100%. They'll jump right into the systems and they'll know exactly how to operate. So we support that 100%. All right, everyone, like I said at the beginning, Nick will be putting up the notifications of the Christmas light, headers for emails, templates. If you're doing Christmas lights later this week, we have a ton of templates going up on the dashboard or, sorry, the pro shop for business cards, all the print marketing material, bunch of different templates and designs all around Christmas lights. So expect those coming up here pretty soon. Some really cool designs that how they're put together. So. All right, guys, have a fantastic rest of your week, and we will stay in touch. We'll see you tomorrow. Sweet. That's awesome. And then we were able to.